


After the Storm

by decrescendo



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: After Eleven | Jane Hopper Closes the Gate, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 02, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 11:10:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18334094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decrescendo/pseuds/decrescendo
Summary: “He’s safe now,” she said again, finding her own voice dangerously shaky.“We thought that last year,” whispered Jonathan.Nancy and Jonathan struggle to come to terms with the events of the past year and all the irreversible ways their lives have changed.





	After the Storm

Nancy didn’t think twice about going back to the Byers’, after. She sat in the passenger seat of Joyce’s car so that Jonathan could hold Will in the back—he hadn’t let go of his little brother the entire time since that thing had been burned out of him—and it felt like the most obvious thing in the world, being there with them. Until they pulled up to the house and she remembered, suddenly, that she wasn’t actually part of the family, no matter how many otherworldly demons she and Jonathan had fought together.

She turned to Joyce before either of them could get out of the car. “I can go,” she said quietly. “I’ll ask Steve to take me and the boys home. So you can—“ She broke off, unsure what she had wanted to say. _Be a family_ , she supposed.

But Joyce just shook her head and smiled slightly, as if she knew exactly what Nancy had meant. She probably did. “You can stay,” she said, “of course you can stay. I doubt anything in the world could separate those boys tonight anyway. Though of course,” she added quickly, “you can go home if you need to. Your parents must be worried.”

Nancy laughed in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it. “I didn’t even think about them,” she admitted. “Is that terrible? They seem like a whole different world.”

“You should call them at least, let them know.” It occurred to Nancy that Joyce was probably remembering her own terror during the time when Will had been missing. “But come on, let’s go inside.” She turned around to look at her boys. “Will? You awake, sweetie?”

He was, but barely. Nancy smiled to see him propped against Jonathan’s shoulder, Jonathan’s arm curled protectively around him. She tried to make eye contact with Jonathan, but his gaze was fixed on his little brother, almost unblinkingly intent, like he still thought he might never see him again. “You ready, buddy?” he asked. Will nodded sleepily.

As Nancy followed them into the house she felt, not for the first time, a twinge of guilt. She’d never been that close to her own little brother, not even now after all they’d been through together. She loved him, of course, but they weren’t friends the way Jonathan and Will seemed to be. But that’s the way it went, she supposed. Different for everybody.

There was quite a lot of chaos inside. Steve and the boys and the new redhead girl were all unspeakably filthy and covered in slime and Steve’s face was a nightmare of bruises and dried blood—“What happened?” she’d gasped, and he’d responded with just a shrug and an apologetic half-smile that made her heart clench—and Mike, after having greeted Will with shouting and laughter and tears, was pacing anxiously at the door, waiting for Eleven and Hopper to return, and, inexplicably, Billy Hargrove was unconscious in a corner of the kitchen, but when Joyce asked what the hell he was doing there the boys all started yelling incomprehensibly all at once, waving their hands animatedly. The ruckus was so great that she almost missed Jonathan, having finally relinquished Will into his friends’ care, silently slipping away into his bedroom.

He had just gone to change or something, she figured, but when twenty minutes and Eleven and Hopper’s return passed without him re-emerging, she began to worry. Finally when Hopper asked, looking around, “What happened to Jonathan?” and no one else could answer, Nancy said, “I’ll go check on him,” and though no one else but maybe Steve knew what had transpired between them, no one questioned or her tried to stop her from going down the hall to his room.

The door was closed. She knocked and then, when there was no answer, called softly, “Jonathan?” Still he was silent, and she felt panicked suddenly, her mind racing with a dozen different scenarios where Jonathan might have succumbed to some slow-acting poison from the Upside Down. She tried again, forcing herself to speak calmly. “It’s Nancy. Can I come in?”

From inside the room, she heard a muffled, “Yeah.”

She opened the door and was surprised to find the room completely dark except for the tiny amount of moonlight coming in through the window. She blinked rapidly, trying to adjust her eyes. After a few seconds she realized that he was lying on his bed, curled on his side, facing away from her. He had not reacted to her entering at all. The panic intensified; was he sick? Had the thing left Will and gotten him instead?

“Are you okay?” she asked carefully.

After a long pause, he said quietly, “I don’t know.”

Nancy felt very cold, all of a sudden. “I’ll get Hopper,” she said, already turning to shout for him. “He’ll know what to—“

“No,” said Jonathan, more loudly, raising his head a bit and turning to look at her, “no, I’m okay, I—there’s nothing physically wrong with me. I’m fine.” Then, after a moment: “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

He sounded close to tears, Nancy realized, his voice shaking and unsteady. She shut the door and walked around to the other side of his bed, to sit on the edge where he was facing her. “Jonathan, what’s wrong?”

He had turned his face back into the pillow. He shrugged.

“Hey.” She reached out and put her hand tentatively on his upper arm, keenly aware that they had not actually discussed their relationship, and she was a bit unsure what the boundaries were at this point. “You can talk to me, you know?”

He was silent a long time and she had begun to think he would not answer at all when he said, finally, “I can’t stop hearing him.”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Will’s screams were still reverberating in her own mind, too.

“And I can’t stop thinking,” he continued, “we didn’t know it would work. We had no idea. We could have killed him, Nance, we—“ His voice broke and he stopped, blinking rapidly.

She rubbed her hand gently up and down his arm, a gesture of comfort that was, she knew, entirely inadequate in the face of his trauma. “But you didn’t kill him,” she said, hating how much she knew she was missing the point. “He’s safe, Jonathan. He’s out there right now falling asleep on the couch because he refuses to leave his friends even to go to bed.”

Jonathan just shrugged again.

“And,” Nancy continued, still rubbing his arm, “he would have died if you hadn’t tried. It was certain death versus possible death, there wasn’t any choice.”

He opened his mouth, tried to speak, found he couldn’t. He swallowed hard. “I guess,” he said roughly. “I just—I hate—it shouldn’t’ve had to happen. Will’s a good kid. Will’s such a good kid, he never—“

Even in the dim light, Nancy could see the tears in his eyes. She took his hand in her free one, tracing circles against it with her thumb. “He’s safe now,” she said again, finding her own voice dangerously shaky.

“We thought that last year,” whispered Jonathan.

Which was true. It was different this time, the rational part of her said—the gate was really closed now, not just hidden from sight—but if she’d felt no immediate foreshadowing of continued danger last year, there was no reason to believe she’d feel it now.She wondered if it would always be like this, now: if she would always have this fear occupying the hidden parts of her mind, untouchable, incurable. She thought of how much worse it must be for Jonathan, whose entire family was so caught up in this, had so narrowly made it out alive.

She found she had run out of words to comfort him. Jonathan was too smart for meaningless platitudes, and to be honest, so was she.

Not quite sure what made her do it, she turned his hand in hers to feel the long, bumpy scar along his palm. “If it happens again,” she said eventually, “we’ll just have to fight again. And we’re pretty much experts, now, yeah?”

Jonathan laughed a little even as a few tears leaked from his eyes and snaked down into his pillow. Nancy, looking down at him, felt her heart twist, and before she could stop herself, she took her hand from his arm to brush the air off his forehead, and pressed a kiss to his temple.

It had either been the very right thing to do or the very wrong thing. As she drew away, Jonathan’s face crumpled and he turned more fully into the pillow as his shoulders began to shake.

“Oh, honey,” whispered Nancy, and then, unsure what else to do, she stood and walked around to the other side of the bed. Slowly, carefully, so he would know exactly what she was doing—she herself still jumped at any sudden touch or movement, after last year—she laid down beside him, pressed against his back. She wrapped an arm around his torso and found his heart, pressed her hand over it to feel its steady beat. After a moment, he covered her hand with his own, keeping it trapped there.

For many long minutes, she held him silently, until his sobs quieted and his shoulders grew still. Finally he asked scratchily, speaking out into the dimness of the room, “Will this ever go away?”

She wanted to say yes. She wanted it more than anything in the world, in that moment. But she still had nightmares, and often—terrifying dreams of the Upside Down or of being trapped in Jonathan’s house with one of those _things,_ frozen to the spot, unable to lift the hand the held the gun. And there were the dreams of Barb: staring at Nancy with cold, judgmental eyes, _I know what you did,_ or, worse still, smiling and laughing as if nothing had ever happened. But everything had happened.

“No,” she said. Then, because they had never actually talked about it: “Do you still have nightmares? About last year?”

“Yeah.” She thought he wouldn’t elaborate, but after a long pause, he did. “Will’s still missing, or Mom and Hop find him but it’s too late, or—or we’re in the forest again, and that thing—and it feels so _real,_ Nance. It always feels so real.”

“I know,” she said, because she did.

“It sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s not fair.”

“It’s _not_ fair.”

They fell silent after that, for so long that Nancy began to wonder if Jonathan might have fallen asleep. Just when she was about to ask, though, he said, “It has been better, though.”

It took her a moment to relocate their conversational thread, after so long a gap. When she realized, though, she smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. They happen less often than they used to, I think. Don’t yours?”

She considered it a moment. Though the nightmares weren’t less terrible than they had been in the beginning, they had, she realized, grown a little less frequent. She’d hardly even noticed. But now that she really thought about it, she’d been sleeping through the night, recently, at least a few times a week, and that had never used to happen. “Yeah,” she said.

“So it didn’t go away,” he started.

“But,” she finished for him, “it did get better.”

“And it will again.” Then, almost pleadingly: “It has to.”

“It will.” She pressed a kiss to the base of his neck, the only part of him she could reach. “It will.”

He pulled her hand to his lips, brushed a light kiss to her knuckles.

He did fall asleep this time, his breaths eventually evening out and his heart rate slowing a bit. Nancy stayed awake, somehow not tired in the least, but with Jonathan’s warm, heavy form in her arms, with Hopper’s muffled rumble down the hall interspersed with the boys’ ever-excited voices, she felt, for the first time in a long time, safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Mumford & Sons song of the same name.


End file.
